There have been many interpretations of the phrase in Genesis 1:26:
"Let us make humankind in our image." To understand this phrase, the
first thing we ought to do is consider how it would have sounded in the
ancient context.

In the ancient world, rulers and kings would
quite often construct statues of themselves - images of the king - that
they would leave in the areas that were far from the king's own home.
This was a subtle way of reinforcing their own authority - sort of
reminding their citizens that they are keeping an eye on this area (even
if it it through messengers). It was also a way to make sure that if
the king ever visited, he would be recognized.Additionally, it was quite
common for rulers to claim to bear the image of their god. For example,
in Egypt, the Pharaoh was considered to be the sole person to bear the
image of their god - and was considered to be an incarnation of the sun
god Ra. Thus, every citizen was inherently inferior to Pharaoh.

So
in light of this, it seems that the Hebrew concept of the image of God -
where all of mankind is made in God's image - is politically
subversive.

There
is a beautiful Hasidic teaching, that before every human being comes a
retinue of angels, announcing, “Make way for an image of the Holy One,
Blessed be He.” How rarely do we listen for those angels when we
encounter another human being. How rarely do we see in another human
being’s eyes an image of everything we hold most dear.

This saying parallels the way Jesus asks us to find the image of God in the humble when he tells the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats. This reminds me of the scene in "Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back" where Luke Skywalker meets Yoda
for the first time. When they meet, Luke merely believes that he has
met a strange and eccentric (possibly crazy) little creature. He never
even stops to think that this short, shriveled, odd little thing could
be a great Jedi Master. In the same way, we miss the image of God when
we only expect to find it in those who are beautiful by human standards -
the Bible asks us to see the image of God in every man and woman and
child, especially within the humble, the overlooked, the marginalized.

Note also that the language of Genesis 1:26 hints at a mystical view when God says "let us make man in our image" - how can God be one (as the famous opening words of the shema state in Deut. 6:4),
but pluralistic? Biology itself teases at the answer - each cell in
our bodies is designated a different task, and we have different types
of cells, and yet each cell contains a set of chromosomes that is
identical to the set possessed by every other cell in the body. Paul
teases at such a mystical view when he refers to us as the body of Christ (see I Cor. 12:27, Rom. 12:5).

Jews refer to Deut. 6:4 - "Hear, O Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord is one!" - as the Shema (the first word is shema),
and it is a central prayer in their practice. But one very interesting
fact about this prayer is missed by English speakers - the original
Hebrew uses both the names "Adonai" (translated "Lord", above) and "Elohim" (translated "God", above). Elohim is, technically, plural - and thus a literal translation might read "the Lord our gods, the Lord is One." It is also interesting to note here that the word "Elohim" is rendered "sons of the Most High" in Psalm 82:6:

I said, "You are gods,And all of you are sons of the Most High."

Rabbi Cooper renders an interesting translation of the Shema in "God Is a Verb":

Shema Yisrael, Adonoy Elohaynu, Adonoy Ehad
(Hear, O Israel, the Lord is Our God, the Lord is One) . The way I
explain the meaning of this prayer is as follows: Listen closely (Shema), that part within each of us that yearns to go directly to God (Israel-Yashar El), the transcendent, unknowable source of sources (Adonoy) and the God that we are able to relate to in Its immanence in everything we experience around us (Elohaynu), both the transcendent (Adonoy) and the immanent, are actually, paradoxically, one and the same (Ehad).

I've
seen a number of modern Jewish mystics use a powerful metaphor to help
understand how every human being bears the image of God. They use the
analogy of a hologram to express this. When a piece of film containing a
normal photograph is cut in half, you will have two halves of an
image. But when a piece of film that a holograph was recorded on is cut
in half, you have the same image on both halves - just slightly out of
focus (see Holography vs. Photography). One way Kabbalists have put this is that we are the "thousand mirrors of God."The analogy can be extended further when we consider Jesus' saying in Mt. 18:20:
"where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them."
If each person is like a part of the holographic film separated from the
rest, then all of God is contained in each person just like the entire
image of the hologram is contained within each part of the film - though
the image will be out of focus. But by drawing together in the Unity
of Love, we bring the image back into focus.

In
conjunction with this concept, it is interesting to consider the
mystical version of the "Golden Rule" that is found in the Gospel of
Thomas:

Love your friends like your own soul, protect them like the pupil of your eye.

This version connects love with sight - implying that without such love, we cannot see clearly. There is a connection here to Matthew 6:22-23 - in his commentary on Matthew, William Barclay’s translation renders this:

The
light of the body is the eye. So then, if your eye is generous, the
whole body will be full of light; but if your eye is grudging, your
whole body will be in the dark. If, then, the light which is in you is
darkness, how great is that darkness!

The word that is often translated in this verse as "sound" ("if your eye is sound") - haplous - can also mean "generous", and since the opposite word used here - poneros
- is quite often used in the Bible to speak of being grudging, Barclay
argues that this verse is telling us that the key to seeing clearly is
generosity.

An
interesting parallel can be found in an old Hasidic tale, where a Rabbi
asks his students how to determine the hour of dawn - the hour when
night ends and day begins. Various answers are offered, and finally the
Rabbi declares that the way to determine this is "when you can look
into the face of another human being and you have enough light in you to
recognize your brother or your sister. Until then it is night and
darkness is still with us."We
are to even see the image of God in our enemies - note that this is not
a concept introduced for the first time by Jesus when he commanded
enemy love (Mt. 5:43-48).
It is interesting to note here that when Jacob (then Israel - literally
"wrestles with God") goes to reconcile with his brother Esau, Gen. 33:3 says that he prostrated himself 7 times. The word used here is "shachah",
which is used not just to speak of an act of prostration before a
monarch, but before God as well. And after their reconciliation, Israel
says to Esau in verse 10: "truly to see your face is like seeing the face of God." Could this be hinting to the greater truth of finding the image of God in our enemy? Some
will say "what about sin" - the Augustinian view that has
(unfortunately) become popular in the West teaches that when man sinned,
man lost the original state he was in. Augustine's view led to Calvinism's
teaching on Total Depravity, where we are identified by
our sin. But the Jewish view of sin and the Image of God is a bit more
similar to the Orthodox view. A popular analogy compares human beings
to an oil lamp, and the Image of God is like a spark from the flame of
God that lights the lamp inside. Sin, in this image, is like the dust
that collects on the glass of the lamp - it does not remove the flame,
does not corrupt it, but merely dims the light that comes from this
flame. The dust can be cleaned, and the light will shine clearly once
again.

It
is as if we had a magnificent portrait of the King, caked over with
cobwebs and mud and dust. The filth itself may be worthless and
offensive, but the portrait remains extremely valuable. Intentional
destruction of this portrait would offend the King Himself. So we must
not destroy the painting . . . we must clean it off and restore it.

This
is how God views every human being. Each one was created in His Image,
and therefore each human is of infinite value. A man does not become
worthless, regardless of his guilt. A woman does not become worthless,
no matter what she has done.

The concept of being "made in the image of God" takes on new meaning through Evolution - as Julian Huxley said:

We are nothing else than evolution become conscious of itself.

This is similar to the way the Kabbalists will speak of the Universe as God unfolding Him-Her-It-Self.

This is why God gives Moses the vague reply to a request for a name (Ex. 3:14): "I am"
- this implies pure consciousness. "I am" does not quite capture the
mystery of the original language - though some translations say "I will
be what I will be". The original language implies all tenses - "is",
"was", and "will be" - thus, God is "is-ness", or the essense of Being itself.In "The Gift of the Jews", Thomas Cahill writes:

YHWH
is an archaic form of the verb to be; and when all the commentaries are
taken into account, there remain but three outstanding possibilities of
interpretation, none of them mutually exclusive. First, I am who am:
this is the interpretation of the Septuagint, the ancient Greek
translation of the Hebrew Bible, which because of its age and its links
to the ancients bears great authority. It was this translation that
Thomas Aquinas used in the thirteenth century to build his theology of
God as the only being whose essence is Existence, all other beings being
contingent on God, who is Being (or Is-ness) itself. A more precise
translation of this idea could be: “I am he who causes (things) to
be” - that is, “I am the Creator.” Second, I am who I am - in other words,
“None of your business” or “You cannot control me by invoking my name
(and therefore my essence) as if I were one of your household gods.”
Third, I will be-there with you: this is Fox’s translation, following
Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, which emphasizes God’s continuing
presence in his creation, his being-there with us.

In the view of God as "Is-ness", God
is in the process of manifesting within the world, and much is still
concealed from us. Our task is not to do anything that will magically
change us, but rather to reveal the image of God which was
already within - though not fully manifest, just as a piece of a
hologram contains the entire image, though out of focus. By expanding
our consciousness through connecting with the rest of Creation which
also contains pieces of the hologram, we can reveal the image of God
more fully. This is why St. Gregory of Nyssa writes in "On the Creation of Man":

It is not in a part of [human] nature that the image is found, but nature in its totality is the image of God.

Indeed, Gregory states in this work that:

It is the whole of nature, extending from the beginning to the end, that constitutes the one image of God.

Gregory's reasoning is stated elsewhere regarding the statement that man was made "in the image of God":

[T]his is the same as to say that He made human nature participant in all good; for if the Deity is the fullness of good, and this is His image, then the image finds its resemblance to the Archetype in being filled with all good.

The idea of nature as image of God is corroborated in mystical Judaism, as we've seen already. One of the early Kabbalists, Moses Cordovero, writes in "Shi'ur Qomah":

The
essence of divinity is found in every single thing - nothing but it
exists. Since it causes every thing to be, no thing can live by anything
else. It enlivens them; its existence exists in each existent.

In another of his writings - Elimah Rabbati - he writes:

Before
anything emanated, there was only Ein Sof. Ein Sof was all that
existed. Similarly after it brought into being all that exists, there is
nothing but it. You cannot find anything that exists apart from it . . .
God is everything that exists, though everything that exists is not
God. It is present in everything, and everything comes into being from
it. Nothing is devoid of its divinity. Everything is within it; it is
within everything and outside of everything. There is nothing but it.

So you might be thinking, at this point, something along the lines of: "well, all this sounds wonderful, but it's a bit out there. And I don't see how any of this can be practically merged with our current understanding of science."

I'd like to attempt to address this by introducing just how weird science has gotten. It seems that the popular understanding is stuck in an outdated form of scientific thinking that might be termed "Newtonian Physics" - after Isaac Newton. Please understand here that I'm not knocking on Newton: he was a brilliant man. It's just that the way of thinking - the paradigm - that he was under is outdated. We have new information now that challenges the Newtonian paradigm. I will delve into this a bit in the next post.

About Me

I am married to a gorgeous woman
who makes life beautiful. I have three children who are the loves of my
life. I am learning more about love every day. My family and I moved
to Chattanooga in December 2010 and are loving it! We've been attending
The Vineyard and are feeling like we are more a part of that church
than we have of any church in a long time. I am a music snob which
means that I hate any radio station that plays just hits resulting in
the same dozen or so songs repeated every hour. I reject the politics of persecution and oppose absolutist, demonizing rhetoric. I am a geek/nerd.

1 Corinthians 13:1-3 NLT

If
I could speak all the languages of earth and of angels, but didn’t love
others, I would only be a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. If I had
the gift of prophecy, and if I understood all of God’s secret plans and
possessed all knowledge, and if I had such faith that I could move
mountains, but didn’t love others, I would be nothing. If I gave
everything I have to the poor and even sacrificed my body, I could boast
about it; but if I didn’t love others, I would have gained nothing.